Google App Engine Blog

News, notes, tips and tricks from the Google App Engine Team

Thursday, May 9, 2013

This was an exciting week for the Debian community who released Debian 7.0 “wheezy” that brings big improvements including hardened security, improved 32/64-bit compatibility and addresses a lot of community feedback. Today we’re adding Debian images for Google Compute Engine. Debian, in collaboration with us, is providing images for both Debian 7.0 “wheezy” and the previous stable release, Debian 6.0 “squeeze.” This support will make it easy for anyone using Debian today to migrate their workloads onto Compute Engine.

For fast performance and to reduce bandwidth costs, Google is hosting a Debian package mirror for use by Google Compute Engine Debian instances. We’ve updated our docs and will support Debian via our usual support options or you can also check out what Debian offers.

We are continually evaluating other operating systems that we can enable with Compute Engine. However, going forward, Debian will be the default image type for Compute Engine. We look forward to hearing your feedback.

-Posted by Jimmy Kaplowitz, Site Reliability Engineer and Debian developer

Will we get access to the source code of the kernel which runs the Debian images on Google Compute Engine? Not all, but many Debian users choose Debian because of the social contract that includes access to source code. I have heard that GCE has its own kernels which run the systems.